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Businesses

Software Piracy At the Workplace? 1006

Posted by kdawson from the anonymous-call-to-the-bsa dept.
An anonymous reader writes "What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat 'We don't pirate software,' and 'We must have paid for it at some point.' Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key, and that version of Office is on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions. As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money. Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?"

Comment Opinion (Score 4, Insightful) 383

by endianx (#30073208) Attached to: Your Opinion Counts At CNN — But Should It?
I find CNN (and other "news" stations) too often use the internet as a way to inject opinions that they don't want to state themselves because it would make them look bias. For example, you read three message from intelligent people who are in favor of government health care, and one from some moron who is opposed. The message is that the majority of people are in favor and the few who aren't are morons. However, the anchors themselves didn't say anything. They were just giving viewer comments. It is a way to inject opinion in to the segments that are officially reserved for news.

Comment DO NOT WANT (Score 1) 1231

by endianx (#29972248) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
I am very unhappy with Koala (Server install). I can't get Xen working with Grub2. I seem to lack the skills to make the switch from grub2 to grub without messing things up.

I am switching back to Debian. I love having access to newer software in the repositories in Ubuntu, but it isn't worth all this trouble. Why switch to grub2? Was grub one really such a major problem?
Idle

Bad Driving May Have Genetic Basis 449

Posted by samzenpus from the born-to-run-off-the-road dept.
Serenissima writes "Bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists. People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it — and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant. 'These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away,' said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex."
Censorship

French Branch of Scientology Is Convicted of Fraud 622

Posted by kdawson from the still-getting-away-with-it dept.
The trial we discussed this spring has come to a verdict, and reader lugannerd was one of several to note a milestone in the fight against the Church of Scientology. "The French branch of the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud and fined nearly $900,000 on Tuesday by a Paris court. But the judges did not ban the church entirely, as the prosecution had demanded, saying that a change in the law prevented such an action for fraud. The church said it would appeal. The verdict was among the most important in several years to involve the controversial group, which is registered as a religion in the United States but has no similar legal protection in France. It is considered a sect here, and says it has some 45,000 adherents, out of some 12 million worldwide. It was the first time here that the church itself had been tried and convicted, as opposed to individual members."
The Internet

FCC Begins Crafting Net Neutrality Regulations 297

Posted by timothy from the nomenclature-of-righteousness dept.
ceswiedler writes "The FCC has begun crafting rules for network neutrality. The full proposal hasn't been released yet, but according to their press release (warning, Microsoft Word document) carriers would not be allowed to 'prevent users from sending or receiving the lawful content,' 'running lawful applications,' or 'connecting and using ... lawful devices that do not harm the network.' There will be a three-month period for comments beginning January 14, followed by 2 months for replies, after which the FCC will issue its final guidelines." Reader Adrian Lopez notes that US Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain has introduced legislation that "would keep the FCC from enacting rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet content and applications." McCain called the proposed net neutrality rules a "government takeover" of the Internet.
Update: 10/24 16:32 GMT by KD : jamie found a Reuters story reporting that the Sunlight Foundation has revealed John McCain to be Congress's biggest recipient of telco money over the last two years — "a total of $894,379..., more than twice the amount taken by the next-largest beneficiary, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev."
Businesses

Blogger Loses Unemployment Check Because of Ads 554

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the time-for-an-injection-of-common-sense dept.
Techdirt is reporting that one unfortunate, unemployed New York lawyer recently had her unemployment benefits greatly reduced because of the incredible $1/day she was earning via ads on her blog. "The whole thing sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, with NY State asking her to get a form from her new 'employer' who didn't exist. Then NY Department of Labor started giving her all sorts of contradicting information, and eventually an 'investigation' into her 'business' — during which time her unemployment benefits were stopped entirely. She's now pulled the Google AdSense from her blog (total earned over the life of the blog $238.75)."
Government

FCC To Propose Net Neutrality Rules 110

Posted by Soulskill from the panic-at-comcast-hq dept.
wiredog writes "From The Washington Post comes news that the FCC is preparing to propose net neutrality rules on Monday. Quoting: '[FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski] will discuss the rules Monday during a keynote speech at The Brookings Institute. He isn't expected to drill into many details, but the proposal will specifically be for an additional guideline on how operators like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can control what goes on their networks. That additional guideline would prevent the operators from discriminating, or act as gatekeepers, of Web content and services. ... The agency is expected to review what traffic management is reasonable and what practices are discriminatory. The guidelines are known as "principals" at the agency, which some public interest groups have sought to codify so that they would clearly be enforceable.'"

SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing 186

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the scaling-up-scalability dept.
Sharky2009 writes "IBM is researching an exaflop machine with the processing power of about one billion PCs. The machine will be used to help process the Exabyte of data per day expected to flow off the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. The company is also researching solid state storage technology called 'racetrack memory' which is much faster and denser than flash and may hold the secret to storing the data from the SKA. The story also says that the SKA is unlikely to use grid computing or a cloud-based approach to processing the telescope data due to challenge in transferring so much data (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day)."
Medicine

Swine Flu Outbreak At PAX 374

Posted by timothy from the crowd-I-walked-through-too dept.
whisper_jeff writes "There's been a confirmed outbreak of Swine Flu at PAX. Those who attended and are feeling under-the-weather after the con should not write it off as a typical convention cold and go see a doctor to make sure, just in case." The linked post also lists the airplane flights of the cases known so far, so if you flew from Seattle on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday for any reason, you might want to compare your itinerary.

Comment I wonder... (Score 1) 1345

by endianx (#29313727) Attached to: Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling"
I was about to write that this would never have worked for me as I didn't gain an interest in educating myself until I left college. However, it was immediately after college that I gained this interest. I'm wondering if that might mean that this actually would have worked for me. What if I hadn't gone to college, would I have gained a desire to learn after high school? What if I hadn't gone to high school, would I have acquired my current thirst for knowledge after middle school? I can't help but feel that it was the structure of education that fueled my apathy. While attending school, I never read anything that wasn't assigned. Now reading is the majority of what I do outside of work.

On a related note. I was home schooled two years. One of those years my parents were somewhat busy with various things and I was left to work on my own sometimes. I mostly just worked on programming (if you consider Visual Basic programming). That leads me to believe, that, left on my own for 12 years of education, I may have acquired highly specialized knowledge in my chosen field, and not much else. It is debatable whether that is good or bad.

I would love to see some studies on this subject.
The Internet

Submission + - UK Climate Change Computer Named Top Polluter (datacenterknowledge.com) 2

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "In a vivid example of the "headline risk" posed by IT energy usage, the UK Meteorological Office has been cited as one of the country's worst polluters — primarily because of its use of a powerful IBM supercomputer used to predict climate change. Met Office spokesmen have sought to argue the merits of the science conducted by the supercomputer (numbers 73 and 74 in the Top 500 list), but media have seized on the seeming disconnect between the agency's goals and the energy overhead of its supercomputing operations. The story has been widely featured by the BBC, The Guardian, Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Sun."

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